Rain whispered against the glass of an abandoned penthouse overlooking the Bosphorus. The city lights shimmered like fragments of broken dreams.
Lydia sat by the window, her breathing steady but her heart chaotic.
Jaden was alive. She'd touched him, felt the pulse beneath his skin — real, warm, and infuriatingly calm despite the gunfire that nearly tore them apart.
He stood across the room now, back turned, his white shirt bloodstained at the shoulder where the bullet had grazed him. The faint hum of encrypted transmissions filled the air.
"Who the hell are they, Jaden?" she asked quietly. "And why do they want us dead?"
He didn't look at her. "They're called the Ascendants. A private alliance of Holloway shareholders… people who own half the global defense contracts. I was supposed to be one of them until I found what they were doing with the company's money."
Lydia frowned. "What do you mean?"
Jaden turned — his expression cold, tired, but burning with resolve.
"They've been funding covert weapons testing in civilian zones. They buried the evidence under fake medical research and humanitarian fronts. My mother tried to stop them."
Her eyes widened. "Your mother?"
Jaden nodded once, his jaw tightening. "She was the first to uncover the files. They made it look like a suicide. That's why I built my empire — to expose them from within."
For a long moment, Lydia couldn't breathe. Everything she thought she knew about him — the arrogance, the mystery, the cold distance — began to fall apart.
"So this was never about money," she whispered. "It was about revenge."
He met her gaze. "No, Lydia. It was about justice."
---
A soft click echoed through the room.
Cassandra stepped out of the shadows, gun in hand, her expression unreadable.
Her hair was slick from the rain, and her black coat clung to her frame like armor.
"Justice?" she said softly. "You still think that exists, Jaden?"
Lydia tensed instantly. "You followed us—"
Cassandra smiled faintly. "You're welcome, by the way. I helped cover your trail after the market. If I hadn't, you'd both be dead by now."
Jaden's eyes narrowed. "Why are you here?"
"To tell you something before it's too late," she replied. "The Ascendants aren't just coming after you anymore. They've activated Protocol Ghost. It's a full erase. Everyone you've ever worked with, every system you built, every account in your name — gone by sunrise."
Lydia's chest tightened. "They can do that?"
Cassandra nodded. "They own the infrastructure. Even governments bend to them when they whisper."
Jaden took a step closer, his tone sharp. "Then why warn me?"
Cassandra hesitated — the first crack in her perfect composure. "Because your mother saved my life once. And she made me promise… that if you ever found the truth, I would help you finish what she started."
The silence that followed was heavy. Lydia could feel the storm building between them — past loyalty, buried guilt, and something dangerously close to redemption.
"What do we do now?" Lydia asked quietly.
Jaden turned to the holographic map flickering beside the desk. "There's one place they can't reach us — the old Holloway offshore archives in Zurich. My mother hid backups of her files there before she died."
"And what then?"
He looked at her — not the calculating billionaire now, but the man stripped bare of everything but determination.
"Then we end it."
---
Hours later – aboard a private jet, midair over the Black Sea.
The hum of the engines was the only sound. Lydia sat beside the window, watching the clouds drift by. Jaden sat across from her, fingers typing rapidly across his encrypted tablet.
She studied him — the way his jaw flexed when he was deep in thought, the faint scars across his knuckles. There was a fragility to him now, one she'd never seen before.
"Jaden," she said finally. "When all this is over… what happens to us?"
He looked up — the question hanging between them like smoke.
"For now," he said, voice low, "we survive. Then we decide."
Lydia smiled faintly, even as her heart ached. "You always have to sound mysterious, don't you?"
But before he could reply, a red alert flashed across the dashboard.
Cassandra, seated near the cockpit, cursed under her breath. "They've locked onto us."
Jaden shot up. "Impossible. The signal encryption—"
"—has been broken," Cassandra cut in. "They're overriding everything."
The jet shuddered violently as warning alarms blared.
"Brace yourselves," the pilot shouted. "They've launched interceptors!"
Jaden grabbed Lydia's arm, pulling her close as the aircraft lurched sideways. The sky outside erupted in fire — two streaks of light closing in fast.
Lydia's voice trembled. "What do we do?"
Jaden's eyes locked on hers, calm amid the chaos.
"Trust me."
The explosion hit a heartbeat later.